Experts and opinions

‘Experts’ have been so wrong on just
about everything
ADAM CREIGHTON
It’s hard to recall a period in history in which experts have been so
comprehensively wrong on so many topics in such a short time.
Think Covid-19, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and inflation.
Intelligence experts looked foolish when it turned out Iraq didn’t
have weapons of mass destruction after all.
The Queen took a dim view of economists, who failed en masse to
foresee problems in the world’s banking system that precipitated
the global financial crisis in 2008.
Economists have a long history of being wrong, at least since more
than 300 of them publicly warned Margaret Thatcher in 1981 that
the British prime minister’s belt-tightening policies would cause a
recession, only to be proved spectacularly wrong a few months
later.
But the decade beginning in 2020 appears to have taken
institutional wrongness to a higher plane. Economists, even after
the embarrassment of calling inflation “transitory” for most of
last year, are still at it; they wrote a public letter in September last
year playing down concerns about inflation and encouraging Joe
Biden to press ahead with his $US3.5 trillion Build Back Better
package. But with inflation at almost 9 per cent in the US,
supporters of the package have gone strangely quiet in recent
months.
Foreign policy experts, though, have given economists a run for
their money since Russia invaded Ukraine, prompting the US and
Europe to wallop Russia with unprecedented sanctions designed to
compel Vladimir Putin to stop his illegal invasion.
They fired a bazooka at their own feet, doing nothing to avert the
war while crushing the competitiveness of European industry and
slashing the living standards of ordinary Americans and
Europeans.
Goodbye German car industry, on current trends.
It’s worse, though. In late March Biden, under the advice of experts
no doubt, said Russia’s currency would be turned to “rubble” by
sanctions. This week the rouble reached a seven-year high against
the US dollar, becoming the best performing currency in the world
this year.
Interest rates on Russian 10- year government bonds, at about 9
per cent, are one percentage point lower than they were before the
war. The Russian central bank is cutting interest rates as the Fed
lifts them.
Soaring energy prices, as a result mainly of Western sanctions,
have supercharged Russian oil and gas revenues, quadrupling the
Russian government’s budget surplus in May compared with the
same month a year ago, as Putin gloated in St Petersburg last week.
Security and intelligence experts haven’t done much better,
routinely foreshadowing the collapse of Russian forces, or even the
imminent death of Putin from a variety of diseases, all while those
forces appear to have slowly occupied a fifth of Ukraine, including
the crucial land corridor between Crimea and Russia.
Perhaps these are the same US intelligence experts who in October
2020 publicly said they were convinced the files on Hunter Biden’s
laptops, which have since raised serious questions about the
business dealings of the US President’s family, had “all the classic
earmarks of a Russian infor- mation operation”. Perhaps, but it
was also entirely real, as similarly benighted media experts have
now conceded.
Then there’s the climate change and energy experts who have been
telling us for years a rising share of solar and wind power in
national grids would cause prices to decline, when the two nations
furthest down that path – Germany and Denmark – have the most
expensive power in Europe.
Batteries would continue to get cheaper, the experts told us,
seemingly oblivious of the impact an immense increase in
mandated demand for electric cars and giant lithium batteries
would have on the price of the critical minerals they require. Not
very smart.
But no group of experts can compete with epidemiologists and
other so-called public health experts for being so militantly and
repeatedly wrong about every aspect of their supposed speciality,
which will go down as one of the great fiascos of history.
Three weeks to flatten the curve turned into almost 850 days of
chaotic, arbitrary restrictions that appeared to do very little in the
end to stop the spread of Covid-19, let alone pass any sort of
rational cost-benefit assessment.
Cloth masks worked, then they didn’t; vaccines protected against
infection, then they didn’t. Two doses were enough, then three,
then four. The virus emerged zoonotically for certain, then it
didn’t.
“Experts say”, “experts warn” has become something of a joke.
It’s not surprising that less than a fifth of American parents, for
instance, intend to vaccinate their toddlers against Covid-19,
according to a recent Kaiser Foundation survey, even though
experts are recommending it urgently.
This false narrative of a consensus among experts risks damaging
public respect for all of them. That’s a pity because genuine
expertise is valuable.
The handful of people presented by the media as experts are a
sliver of the total, among whom there is rarely a true consensus on
anything. Social media has supercharged the incentives to
moralise and fall victim to groupthink. On top of that, expert ranks
have swollen as society has become richer, enabling more people
to think for a living.
That means the average quality of advice has declined, providing
the media with a greater number of potentially crowdpleasing,
dubious opinions to promote.
Experts get it wrong often because they bear few personal
consequences of their advice. The accuracy of past predictions or
assessments is rarely checked. For experts, it’s much more
important to be on the right side of the debate than to be right.
Most of all, experts’ incomes typically are guaranteed whatever
they say; others bear the consequences.
The past few years have been a crisis for the reputation of experts,
but not for experts themselves.